[Aaron Bitler] and [Bud Townsend] have been working a natural user system that is, in their own words, “what android@home should have been.”

The video they posted is pretty impressive. The automation system responds to voice and can control appliances, ‘throw a party’, and provide a user with their location. This is just the foundation of a system that can be built upon – developers can easily integrate a microphone and speaker into a device so it can connect to the system’s server. Apps, too, are pretty extensible – they’re registered on the server with meta tags that provide a wealth of data to be manipulated. It’s a very, very cool project that we really want to try out.

After seeing the video, the first thought was to go through every episode of Star Trek collecting recordings of [Majel Barrett’s] speech. [Douglas Rain] is still alive (and still sounds like HAL), but we’d probably go with GLaDOS. If our house is going to kill us anyway, we’ll go with the one that will give us some blog cred.

This may or may not become yet something truly interesting – with all due respect, I’m not knocked aback by a piece of voice recognition software. Also, ye olde X10 stuff reacted faster than that to commands, and we thought _that_ was horribly slow…

In the end, the problem of current “smart homes” is that they’re anything but. A few logic interlocks and “scenarios” (aka glorified batch commands) do not warrant being called “smart”. And that’s unlikely to change in my opinion as long as homes do not actually employ an AI that’s truly aware of what is happening inside. Contextually aware, like a human being. And we’re nowhere near there, afaik.

But hey, I’d be glad to be proven wrong (I think…?) Either that, or scared…

@MadMax
I see where you are coming from, but I can assure you, that when all said and done, our NUS will be well beyond glorified batch commands. It will take some time, but we can do it. Thanks for your input!